I'm excited to share with you that today my first fiction novel, Chasing the Seeds, has been published!

I wrote this book, and the series that it begins, to be entertaining and suitable for adults as well as teens (probably late teens; parents you should read the book before deciding whether your teen child should).

It is "clean" meaning: zero profanity, zero blasphemies, zero sexual stuff. 

What's the book about?

When Edmund, a young software engineer from Austin, discovers a clue in his deceased father's book, the contents launch him on a worldwide scavenger hunt for a mysterious prize that will shake the power structure of the entire world.

Pursued by a rogue FBI agent, Edmund must overcome his loner tendencies and welcome help from a friend, a mentor, and a beautiful young woman to get to the prize before the agent does...and without being killed.

Along the way, there's a worldwide run on the banks as the Fed battles the European Central Bank, plunging the world into chaos...

Bitcoin and the Catholic Church: could two things be any more different and at odds with one another?

In fact, after reading this article, I hope to convince you that Bitcoin is not only compatible with the Catholic Church, but also that Bitcoiners should become Catholics themselves.

Why Bitcoin and the Catholic Church Seem to Be at Odds

Centralization vs. Decentralization

Bitcoin runs as a peer-to-peer network of computers (let's call them nodes, though special nodes exist, for example, mining nodes). This network is decentralized, meaning that these nodes are being run all over the world by a diverse group of people, most of whom don't know each other, and connect to one another is way that is ad hoc and not centrally controlled and planned.

So Bitcoin is DECENTRALIZED, while the Catholic Church appears to be the epitome of CENTRALIZATION.

The Catholic Church is a hierarchical organization, with the Pope at the top, the bishops under him, priests under the bishops, and then the...

I first heard about Bitcoin when the Mt. Gox implosion happened around early 2014.

I saw the Bitcoin price chart and gasped when it went up parabolically to almost $1,200, then collapsed down into the $200s.

At the time, I didn't know anything about sound money, fiat currency, or the Federal Reserve, so the idea of Bitcoin seemed crazy to me, even though I was a software developer who could understand the technology behind it.

From No-coiner to Bitcoiner

Not long after, a friend of mine kept encouraging me to get into cryptocurrency, specifically Ethereum, but intuition told me that Bitcoin was the first one, so I bought a small amount of Bitcoin in 2015. I purchased no Ethereum.

I viewed Bitcoin as a highly speculative investment, but after buying it, I had skin in the game and started watching the price and the news on it.

I had my Bitcoin on an exchange and didn't own a hardware wallet.

Price-wise, Bitcoin wasn't doing anything spectacular, so I slowly lost interest in it, but...